On Wed, Mar 17, 1999 at 02:10:20PM -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Seth M. Landsman wrote: > > > > If you need your machine for "real work" then you shouldn't be running > > > unstable. > > > > If debian unstable isn't tested on machines used for real work, > > debian is going to end up a toy distribution which is only suitable for > > work on systems which aren't appropriate for real work. > > If your only PC to do "real work" on is running an ever-changing, > developer-suited version of Debian, then you're really asking for some > "mission-critical" failures. Not having at least a fairly recent backup > before upgrading critical libraries is ridiculous, and it doesn't take a > developer to know that (I offer myself as evidence on that point).
Much as I'd love to have backups of my system, it's just not feasible. I run unstable because I want to test Debian, find bugs, run the latest programs. I read bugs and debian-devel and devel-changes so that I am aware of potential problems. Severe breakages are rare, normally you just need to downgrade a package or two, and that's fine. We really need these test areas to become more standardised - less of the "grab it from my home directory" and more "it's in staging/glibc2.1" or "staging/perl5.005". Currently getting packages from Debian unstable/experimental/staging(all over the place)/gnome-debs/enlightenment/etc is in a mess. People should be able to go to _one_ place for all work done by Debian developers. Most of this stems from Debian getting _very_ large quicker than the underlying systems can cope. It looks like the right noises and steps are being made - two years ago "apt" wasn't known at all, and now :-) Adrian email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.poboxes.com/adrian.bridgett Windows NT - Unix in beta-testing. PGP key available on public key servers Avoid tiresome goat sacrifices -=- use Debian Linux http://www.debian.org
